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Sea of Reeds

I have a mini-run coming up in January of my latest theater piece, Sea of Reeds, at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. (For tix & info, click here.) We had the initial run this past summer (at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley), and it was a blast — but I felt (I think everyone involved felt) the show could go deeper. I’m sure you could say that about all my shows … but there’s something in the subject matter of this particular show — growing older, coming to terms with my Jewishness, the complexities of the modern state of Israel — that seems to call especially loudly for more self-questioning.

A challenge at this stage of the piece is that I actually have to write. In the past couple decades or so, I’ve developed all my shows through improvising — to audiences, and to my director-collaborators. This has turned out to be a cool way for me to generate material, as I never have to do it alone (like a real writer); also, this method has resulted in shows that sound like me: Since I develop them through talking, they tend to sound (and be) very natural — not too literary, or stilted (I hope!). But there’s another side to that coin: developing shows this way can also be limiting. For one thing, it’s hard to create non-monologue material in this manner. This was a big deal with Sea of Reeds, as Patrick Dooley — artistic director of the Shotgun Players of Berkeley, who commissioned the piece — specifically asked me to create a show that would have other performers on stage with me.

What ended up happening is this: For a year or so, I followed the usual process for developing a new monologue: improvising to small audiences, while doing research, taking notes, etc. But then, when it came time to “open up” the piece for the other performers (one actress-musician and four musician-actors), I didn’t know what to do! I’d never created a script before the run of a show — only transcripts that came after the run. But with multiple performers, you need to let them know, in advance, what you want them to do — so they can, you know, rehearse and memorize stuff. Fortunately, my director-collaborator, David Dower, saved the day — writing up material for the actress (the fabulous Amy Resnick) and the musicians to say (some of it adapted from videotapes my son did during our family trip to Israel). So I kind of developed my own lines in my usual, monologuing way, and the other material came from David (also, Amy improvised a bunch of great stuff).

Now, as we prepare to re-mount the show in January, David is far away, doing fantastic things that, alas, are not focused on me. And Patrick has made it clear to me that, especially given the restraints of time and money, I can’t indulge in my usual process (improvs, and more improvs). So I need to actually, you know, write stuff. … And, in truth, there’s another reason for me to try this (to me) novel approach: the subject matter is so difficult that it’s been really hard for me to try to work it out on my feet, in front of people. When I have an audience I feel protected — but also, I suppose, I feel a compulsion to try to entertain. Which, often, is a good thing — I want my shows (even the improvs) to be entertaining! But what if a subject raises strong mixed feelings in both me and my audience? Then what can happen is that my performer’s impulse to seek approval can get in the way of reaching a deeper truth.

I learned long ago that an audience in the theater is capable of holding much more complexity than I am capable of delivering. It has been my asymptotic goal to try to give them that deeper truth, as best I can. Now, with Sea of Reeds, I’m finally trying to get there the old-fashioned way — with written words. With Patrick’s and Amy’s help and encouragement, I’m generating an actual script, which we will then rehearse from. I cannot begin to tell you how terrifying this is to me! (Though I guess I’m trying to.) Words on a page (or screen) are, like Fredo to Michael Corleone, dead to me. But I am working on having the faith that they (or at least some of them) will come alive in performance. Or, to put it another way, I am trying not to visualize audiences rejecting this new stuff. Because now, for the first time (for me), the audience won’t be present at the creation of the lines — and thus won’t be able to validate any of the many choices that a writer has to make.

This feels appropriate for a show that (I think) is about the passionate need for dialogue. But try telling that to my frightened mind! Maybe when we say we want dialogue, sometimes what we really mean is that we want to feel evolved? Maybe real dialogue involves more discomfort than we’re willing to experience. I get older, and I see all the ways I have learned to make myself comfortable — this is who I am, these are the things I believe. Now I have a chance, a rare chance, to question those habits, maybe even change some of them. Will I be able to get myself to do so? I suppose writers — real writers — come up against this question all the time.

Just posted my second entry as a guest blogger — offering more notes on the process of developing my new show, Sea of Reeds — over at 3200 Stories. It’s titled “An Ill Wind,” which should give my mom — and any other Danny Kaye fan — reason to smile. You can read it here.

Just in case you might wish to read more of my neurotic ramblings than can be found in this space, I’ve just started guest-blogging for 3200 Stories, a website run by the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco — where I will be performing my next theater piece, Sea of Reeds, early next year, after premiering it at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley this summer.

They’ve asked me to do occasional reports from inside the process of creating the new show — and I just posted the first one, which can be found here.

By the way, it would be more accurate to say that I will be performing in my next theater piece — as Patrick Dooley, artistic director of the Shotgun Players and commissioner of Sea of Reeds, has challenged me (and my longtime director and collaborator, David Dower) to include other performers onstage. You know, as in a “play.” A weird concept for a longtime monologuist like me to grok, but I’m getting there!

Our second class — in the series of four that I am sharing with Rabbi Menachem Creditor, titled “Swimming the Sea of Reeds” — focused on several myths that the Jewish spiritual tradition has inserted into gaps in the Torah’s account of the Sea of Reeds story. These were from a remarkable book, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism, edited by Howard Schwartz, that I keep always nearby, a seemingly inexhaustible source of wonder. I’m not sure whether these tales fall into the category of midrash — filling in the gaps left by the official accounts — but since I’m sitting here all alone in my office writing this (as far as I can tell!), I’m going to say that they do.

A couple of them imagined a further life for the relatively minor Biblical character Serah bat Asher, who — in one account we read — appears a thousand years after the parting of the Red Sea (as it is called in Tree of Souls, rather than the Sea of Reeds) and informs a rabbi and his students what really happened that day. And they have to believe her because she was there — she was a witness. This story put me immediately in mind of the Holocaust survivors I used to meet as a child in New York. My mother or father — whichever parent had custody of me that day — would make a point of introducing me. And as I shook the hand of the older man, or woman, my mom or dad would quietly point to the numbers tattooed on the forearm. These numbers were the proof, if one was needed: proof that these human beings had once been accorded the status of things. To look into the eyes of these survivors was, to me, to peer into infinity: to try to apprehend a suffering that I could not imagine, which, miraculously, had not succeeded in robbing them of their humanity. And yet — and this was part of the miracle — they were “only” people, not supernatural spirits or gods.

For those of us blessed with lives of relative comfort, there is, I think, a temptation to ascribe magical qualities to those who experience enormous and prolonged suffering and degradation — which, in turn, can allow us the further comfort of separating ourselves from their plight. It’s as if these distant sufferers become bit players in what we experience as the epic dramas of our own lives — adding color, and a sense of depth. How much more difficult it is — how horrifying — to confront the idea, the reality, that these terrible things have happened — happen — to real people. Then it could be me, or you — or, God forbid, our children.

It is, perhaps, paradoxical that a fanciful story about an imaginary woman — who, impossibly, lived for at least a thousand years — may help me to connect with real people in the real world in which I live, instead of cowering (as I spend so much of my time doing) in a personal fantasy that shields me from some pain, but also from action, from life, and from love. Paradoxical, but (I think) palpably true.

So how tough were the Israelites, really? This question — like a stand of reeds — lay just beneath the surface of our many discussions in the first installment of the four-session class that I’m doing with Rabbi Menachem Creditor at Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley. Titled “Swimming the Sea of Reeds,” this short but intense course is an attempt to investigate what happened at that crucial moment in the Book of Exodus when the fleeing Israelites, seemingly about to be slaughtered by the Egyptians, experienced a saving miracle: the sea in front of them parted, they went through to the other side, and then the sea closed over their pursuers, killing them instead.

That sea, which I remember being referred to as the Red Sea (a pleasing name in my Communist childhood), is called, in the great modern translation by Robert Alter, the Sea of Reeds. Which, as I have recently taken up the double-reeded oboe again — after a break of many decades — I find even more gratifying. In fact, I was so taken by the term Sea of Reeds that I decided to make it the title of my next theater piece. And that, in turn, strongly suggested that the piece live at the intersection of two kinds of practice: Jewish and musical. (Yes, I typically retrofit my shows to titles that I love. So for example, when — in researching a medical condition called Sjögren’s syndrome — I once happened upon a newsletter called “The Moisture Seekers,” it was practically inevitable that I’d develop a show about sex just to go with that title.)

The reading for this session was Chapter 14 of Exodus, in which the sea-splitting happens. Like all the other chapters, it’s filled with language and imagery that I find endlessly evocative, confusing, and elliptical. Alter’s notes do a great deal to elucidate the text — or at least to clarify what the confusion is about — but that still (fortunately) leaves much to ponder. And as I mentioned earlier, in class one big, recurrent issue for us was the question of how much, exactly, did Moses and the Israelites do. Because the narrative makes it quite clear that God was acting, in essence, as the grand puppeteer — hardening Pharaoh’s heart when the Egyptian king was about to give up the chase, directing Moses’ actions so that this (very) human being (and not God) would appear to be causing the miracles, and generally moving all the characters along in such a way that the Israelites would ultimately triumph.

So were the Israelites heroes, in the sense that we usually think of the word? If I had any knowledge at all about ancient Greek drama, I would insert an impressive passage here about Oedipus and Fate — but I don’t, so I can’t. And yet there seems to be a similar vibe here — perhaps an ancient vibe — that has to do with the Gods (or, in this case, the one God) having already written the stories that we humans, in our self-centered way, register as our own experiences. So ironically, in the Exodus story — which is seemingly about the transformation of a slave population into a culture with agency — the protagonists themselves are quite passive. Actually, worse than passive — they also do a lot of kvetching! Often they sound like elderly passengers on a cruise ship that’s turned out to be much less luxurious than in the brochure.

But there’s something else, too — a deeper thing — that I felt from that chapter, and that I think others in the class felt as well: As much as we (or, at least, I) may, well, kvetch about it, the language also transmits an enormous amount of power. There is, in this story — in the way this story is told — a profound empathy with those who suffer terribly, who lack agency. And there are so many people who suffer in this way, day after day — for whom the miraculous gift of a life is something more like a curse. What draws me to Judaism — and to other forms of theology as well (and, for that matter, to democracy) — is the idea that our purpose, in our own lives, is to try to improve the lives of others; and the belief (hope?) that a community of like-minded people can work at this together. In what I see as a violent and quite random universe, it is incredibly strange that we might choose to spend our brief time of consciousness (or, at least, much of it) in such ethical pursuits; and so it is perhaps only fitting that it would take incredibly strange language to describe that journey — and, more important, to inspire similar journeys.

And if we’re really going to go there, together, through the Sea of Reeds — intellectually, spiritually, and physically — I think we’re going to have to be quite tough indeed.

I’ve started practicing the oboe again — as part of the long development process towards my next theatrical piece, Sea of Reeds (a commission by the Shotgun Players in Berkeley, in collaboration with my long-time producer, Jonny Reinis, and director, David Dower). And so all the sensations of oboe-playing — which I haven’t done regularly since I was a teenager — are coming back. The feel of the reed between my lips. The too-loud clacking of the keys as I press them (working on that!). The smell of cork grease in the morning.

And the awareness, at every moment, of my longing to create something that’s beautiful! It is that gap — between the sounds I am making and those I wish to produce — that, more than anything else, brings me back to those teen years, when my hope was that I was going to become great: at oboe-playing, at math, at sports, at love. But what I was really good at, in retrospect, was in not becoming anything other than this — my parents’ child. And somehow I got it in my head that being their child meant never working hard at things. If I was precocious: fine! But when that precociousness was challenged — when, in the terms of math or marathon running, I “hit the wall” — I was at a loss. To be struggling was to be uncool.

The funny thing is, as I’m writing this, I’m remembering one of the very few criticisms that my father ever addressed to me. I was a teenager; we were standing in the narrow hallway of the bustling apartment that he and my stepmother, Sue, had set up, with my young siblings underfoot everywhere; and he must have been reacting to something I’d said, or hadn’t said, that reflected a privateness — a distance, at least, from him. “You’re cool,” he said, appraising me. … I know, it doesn’t sound like much of a critique! And I don’t think he meant it in a totally negative way, either. But it was as if, after idealizing me since my birth — and projecting the most glorious future onto me — Dad was, in that moment, seeing right through to my essential self; and he was realizing, with a sigh, that his ideal and the reality had, somewhere, diverged.

Through no fault of his, or of anyone’s, I have devoted much of my time since then to trying to close that gap — to revert to the contours of the perfect vision he (and maybe Mom as well) had of me as a little boy. Kind of like standing partway out into the ocean and hoping that, if I just stay there, doing absolutely nothing, the currents will pull me back to shore. When in fact that journey has already, irrevocably, begun — when, in fact, it has mostly happened. So that the real question is, What will I do as I head to the other side?

It’s shocking that progress is not inevitable! Neither in our individual selves nor in society. As a child I believed it was inevitable, with all my heart; I was a fundamentalist of progress — I had no doubt. So how to reconcile that ideology with my experience of practicing the oboe and not becoming great? A conundrum! This, I think now, is where faith comes in. But I also think I need to adjust my concept of faith — or perhaps that adjustment has already begun. Because I used to think that faith required — was pointed at — a perfect result: a utopia. Now I don’t consider perfection a goal — or even a possibility, or even (God help me) desirable (because it suggests the death of change). Now I consider the goal to be: better. Just better. A better world. A better transition from C to C-sharp (lots of fingers have to be slapped down at once, as quietly as possible). Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the object of my faith is now a process — one that keeps open the space for improvement.

Also, the oboe being what it is, I have a short-term goal of being able to practice for more than 20 minutes at a time! (The old embouchure ain’t what it used to be, which itself wasn’t what it should have been.)

I’ve been doing scales, sometimes with a metronome. Also, etudes from the massive Barret Oboe Method book that has weighed down the music stand of every oboist I know. And — with a vague idea that the music of J.S. Bach will play a featured role in Sea of Reeds — I’ve been dipping into a book I have containing many of Bach’s lovely cantatas for oboe and voice. That book is called Difficult Passages — a title that’s bracing in its blunt honesty. It leaves unmentioned the fact that those passages, if played well, are also beautiful. … Actually, they’re beautiful even if not played well (as just happened when I practiced a few of them). Because, somehow, in these compositions the ideal is always immanent. Which I now feel I am finally beginning to understand as, facing back at where I began, I blow myself, in tiny increments, towards the other shore.